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Date: Sat, 23 May 2020 00:08:25 -0700
Message-ID: <CANaX5ncGdoKJ4RyQpiQUqG_GQQyBFkny5S7MPCGs6uV=Ho1CnA@mail.gmail.com>
To: Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com>
Cc: Rowan Tommins <rowan.collins@gmail.com>, PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] HTTP/1.1 by default in PHP 8.0
From: davey@php.net (Davey Shafik)

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dopOn Fri, May 22, 2020 at 3:58 AM Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 11:54 PM Rowan Tommins <rowan.collins@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > A few years ago, I posted a message suggesting that PHP improve support
> > for HTTP/1.1 in its stream wrapper functions:
> > https://externals.io/message/96192
> >
> > A quick summary of the current situation:
> >
> > * HTTP/1.1 was officially standardised in January 1997, and most web
> > browsers had already implemented it by then
> > * PHP has a very simple HTTP client implementation, used by the "http:"
> > and "https:" stream wrappers, and also by extensions which make HTTP
> > requests, such as ext/soap
> > * The client implementation defaults to advertising HTTP/1.0 requests,
> > unless over-ridden by a stream context option
> > * Since a lot of servers only actually talk HTTP/1.1, the client mostly
> > acts as an HTTP/1.1 client even when advertising HTTP/1.0
> >
> >
> > In my previous message, I identified four requirements in HTTP/1.1 but
> > not HTTP/1.0 that are relevant to a client:
> >
> > a) Send a "Host" header with every request. (RFC 7230 Section 5.4)
> > b) Support persistent connections, or send "Connection: Close" with each
> > request. (RFC 7230 Section 6.1)
> > c) Ignore 1xx status lines (notably, "100 Continue") "even if the client
> > does not expect one" (RFC 7231 Section 6.2)
> > d) Support "chunked" transfer encoding (RFC 7230 Section 4.1)
> >
> >
> > The PHP client now supports all four regardless of protocol version
> > configured, i.e. it always sends "Host:" and "Connection: Close"
> > headers; and always handles "100 Continue" and "Transfer-Encoding:
> > Chunked" if returned by the server.
> >
> > I would like to propose that the client advertises HTTP/1.1 in its
> > requests by default in PHP 8.0.  Users can opt out of this behaviour in
> > a fully backwards- and forwards-compatible way if necessary using a
> > stream context option, e.g.:
> > https://gist.github.com/IMSoP/a685fed6589435530102d57138755511
> >
> >
> > What are people's opinions? Does this need an RFC, or should I just
> > submit a PR if nobody objects?
> >
>
> Sounds good to me. Assuming there are no objections, feel free to just send
> a PR.
>
> @Eliot: Unfortunately we don't implement HTTP 2 in the http:// stream
> wrapper, so HTTP 1.1 is the best we can do there right now. We only provide
> HTTP 2 support through the curl extension. Implementing HTTP 2 support
> would certainly be a possibility, but I don't think it's particularly easy
> to do so without pulling in a dependency like nghttp2.
>
> @Max: I'm only guessing here, because I'm not familiar with the historical
> context, but I imagine part of the motivation is to support HTTP requests
> in a minimal build of PHP, which does not have any dependencies (that we do
> not bundle ourselves).
>
> We did actually provide an implementation of the http:// stream wrapper
> via
> curl for a long time, but dropped it at some point, because there were many
> subtle behavior differences to our native implementation.
>
> Regards,
> Nikita
>

This is ridiculously timely as I've been spending my evening working on
HTTP/2 stuff in PHP.

This might be a good time to reopen discussion of adding support for HTTP/2
in PHP with the inclusion of libnghttp2. I posted a long time ago about
adding support for HTTP/2 to the CLI server and the http stream using
libnghttp2 [1].

I think PHP 8.0 would be a perfect opportunity to revisit this given that
HTTP/2 has now reached ~97% adoption[2] and HTTP/3 is on the horizon.

I believe that HTTP/2 has the potential to dramatically change how we serve
content on the web, and PHP should jump on the bandwagon.

- Davey

[1] https://externals.io/message/89932
[2] https://caniuse.com/#search=http%2F2

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